Ursula Morley-Price

Recent works

November 8, 2014 - January 8, 2015

Ursula Morley-Price, the ceramist's exhibition at the Galerie de l'ancienne poste in November 2014. Photos Anne Nguyen-Dao

An important event for lovers of contemporary ceramics, each new Ursula Morley-Price exhibition is also for all audiences a striking encounter with the art of clay. Born in London in 1936 and a graduate of prestigious British art schools, Ursula Morley-Price has lived and worked in France since 1973. Nevertheless, her reputation is international, and her ceramics, characterized by virtuosity of form, now feature in some of the world's greatest museums, including the Metropolitan Museum and MoMA in New York, where she has been exhibiting regularly for many years. In France, the growing renown of the Galerie de l'Ancienne Poste in Toucy has not escaped the artist, and in 2011 the start of a collaboration led to a first solo exhibition in Toucy, followed in 2013 by a major retrospective exhibition at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Troyes.

This exhibition by Ursula Morley-Price at the Galerie de l'Ancienne Poste features a dozen new sculptures by the artist, who is developing her formal expression here, particularly from the "Large Twist Form" which caused a sensation at the Musée de Troyes and is now part of the museum's collections. Driven by this double-revolution movement, the works once again bear witness to the immense talent of a rare artist.

Ursula Morley-Price in Connaissance des Arts
Ursula Morley-Price in L’OEIL

The beauty of Ursula Morley-Price's pieces stems from this very confusion: on the one hand, from the very rigorous, structured organization of her approach, her skill with clay; on the other, from the way she infuses them, perhaps unwittingly, with a breath of life that - in the eyes of the beholder - seems to make the apparently fragile skin of these "things" throb, frozen in an attitude ready to take off or imbued with a desire for flight. The corolla seems to have opened in a documentary-like acceleration.

It would take him a lifetime to achieve the virtuosity of his early forms. It would take him a lifetime to achieve the virtuosity of his early forms, adding a gyratory motion that would propel them like a propeller, giving the sensation of unfolding and swaying in the wind! The clay obtained in his hands is so fine as to be almost transparent, like the texture of linen or cigarette paper. [...] Starting from a hollow (for the central interior of each piece remains a hollow, always present), she builds her framework by attaching a succession of thin fins to its edges, which she mounts by stretching them outwards. She invents fullness from emptiness. She patiently builds up her "skeleton", adding bit by bit, piece by piece, like a piece of cake. Her modelling is the result of a strong desire for architecture. [...] The imagination gallops. Ursula's work speaks to us like the living body it is.

Elisabeth Védrenne
Art critic
Excerpt from the catalog of the "Ursula Morley-Price" exhibition at the Musée d'Art Moderne de Troyes, 2013